Jolt Awards 2014: The Best Testing Tools

AscentialTest tests a Web application using an approach that hews closely to the user exercising the keyboard and mouse to work through the functionality. It does so without the keyword-driven scripting language that characterizes other competing Web application testing products. Rather, the developer simply drags an object from the page under test into the AscentialTest workspace. The product looks at the underlying HTML of the object and figures out what is underneath. It then presents a mechanism for collecting testing values for that object, even objects as complicated as multidimensional tables. External spread sheets containing collections of test values are thus eliminated (as well as their maintenance and coordination) by this drag-and-drop approach.

The result is an abstract test "step," which can be combined with other "steps" for other objects to develop a complete test package for the many pages of an app (or even just a single page). Steps combined into libraries of step sequences can be constructed for new pages without needing extensive analysis of those new pages.

In the process of working with AscentialTest, I discovered that the reusability of the step approach means that if there is a change to one step, all pages that use that step are implicitly updated  saving me considerable work. AscentialTest is an original solution and a very effective way to test Web apps without endless manual effort.

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